I would watch the hell out of Olympic dodgeball!
Sure, I got what you were saying. But it’s the dope; someone has to say how long competitive events have actually been around.
And in terms of the public consciousness, it depends where you are. It’s pretty well-known in the UK, France, the Netherlands, maybe Japan and South Korea.
You should see canoe polo.
You’re posing this as if it’s some kind of mystery. 
Breakdancing requires athletic ability. That’s why Raygun, who isn’t nearly as athletic as her opponents, received zero points.
Bodybuilding is about building up an appearance and then being judged by that appearance. It’s a kind of beauty pageant. Sure, building muscle requires a great deal of training and discipline, but you’re only judged by your appearance.
Chess and esports are mental contests. Esports do require reflexes to an extent, so there is a bit of a physical element to it, but it’s fairly minor. You are only pushing buttons on a controller. It’s much more of mental contest than a physical one.
The Olympics feature the world’s best athletes. Anything that isn’t an athletic contest doesn’t belong. That’s pretty basic.
It seems to me that pressing a button is at least as much an athletic activity as pulling a trigger, and nobody tells the target shooters they can’t be in the Olympics.
Possibly because they have guns.
I dunno, I’m a nearly-70-year-old diabetic with peripheral neuropathy, but I gotta say, my slip, fall, and flailing attempt to get back up last week had more artistic flair than Raygun’s Olympic break-dance performance.
As someone who has fired guns and played video games, I find this comment hilarious.
No, just no.
Shooting a target isn’t just “pulling a trigger” unless the Olympics have an event where there is a fixed gun that’s bolted down and pointed at a target.
You have to aim precisely, hold a heavy gun steady, pull the trigger perfectly (without the slightest twitch), endure the kickback, you even have to breathe properly to not throw your aim off. I used to go to the range and shoot off a hundred rounds from a pistol and I was exhausted by the time I was done.
Video games don’t do that.
If they had some kind of VR game where you have to dodge and punch, for example, that’s athletic. Or some kind of Dance Dance Revolution contest, sure, that would make sense. But a standard video game you could play on your couch…?
It seems to me that many of the sports in the ancient Olympic Games were martial and meant to demonstrate soldiering skills, like the javelin throw, wrestling, boxing, etc. So for the modern games to include shooting seems appropriate.
Two new OIympic sports I want to see:
- Not my idea, but I love it: revamp the triathlon. It’s the final event of the Olympics, and any Olympic athlete can register for it. Once registration is closed, they put write all the Olympic sports on slips of paper, put them in a hat, and draw three out. That’s the triathlon for the year.
- Building off @Babale’s scissor-kick post. You can’t do Shaolin soccer, but the next best thing is Sportsdancing. Teams of athletes choreograph a game of a team sport like soccer or basketball, to make it three minutes of the most awesome, stunt-filled play imaginable. Judge it like figure skating.
By the way, I’m open to the general idea that the judged sports be removed from the Olympics (which would mean breakdancing wouldn’t be allowed either). I’m a lot more interested in the sports where I can see easily whether someone won or not rather than wait for the opinion of judges.
I just think if you disallow an event solely because it’s judged on its artistic merits, you’d need to disallow all of them.
I get that take, but I’m much more interested in the sports that are fun to watch. Who wins and who loses is less interesting to me than whether I get to watch someone do something nifty.
That’s fair. And for some reason I absolutely love to watch figure skating. I have never been able to articulate why, but I’m enthralled by it.
I think some of the dislike of judged events is leftover from the judging scandals and travesties of years past. Especially since the revision to scoring rules in gymnastics, these incidents are much rarer.
And these so-called “pure” sports still have subjective calls. Team sports like soccer and basketball rely on officials to call fouls. Running races have subjective interference calls when runners bump each other. Swimming has illegal strokes and turns.
There is truth to this. There is no such thing as a 100% objective sport, it’s rather a degree of how much subjective judgement is part of the contest.
Then again, the difference between, say, figure skating and speed skating is pretty obvious.
It definitely is, but maybe not quite to extent that people think. A lot of what we think are subjective calls are much better defined now than they were in the past. There are set deductions for certain things, defined difficulty ratings, etc. Scores between judges are more consistent now than in the past.
That said, I’d be fine with eliminating “artistic expression” as judging criteria in all events. That doesn’t seem like athletic achievement to me. Keep the sports, change the scoring.
It’s called the Olympic Games not Sports.
If we really want to be true to the spirit of the original games, we could return to the all-nude competition.
Speaking as someone who’s strongly in favor of cultural appropriation, my issue is that Raygun didn’t do it well.
That made me laugh. Sorry.
Paintball. Now that would be fun.